Random thoughts on the blue highways.
You never know what you will find on the blue highways. Particularly when the choice at an intersection is controlled by the roll of a die. About the only rule is that highway onramps don't count as an intersection. You don't even have to roll the die. If one road looks interesting, go for it.

About Me

Don't look for me much on the big news sites, I skim through them, but rarely find much that is worth commenting on. As a young son once said "We don't watch TV news, dad won't let us watch violence programs." I still don't.
Interests are religion, marketing theory (that is not an oxymoron,) Advertizing, digital photography, APOD, and historically, rocket science.
e-mail: jcarlinbl@gmail.com
The literary version is found at Thinking On the Blue Roads
The raw data for which can be found on The Blue Roads of Thinking.

Monday, March 27, 2017

As you know my sources are strictly biblical. I studiedmost of the religious and scholarly translations of bibles
scholastically and philosophically since an early age. I never was a
believer. Most of my studies were to poke at believers of all faiths.

The Synoptic Passions were probably fable designed to remove Jesus but not his messages from the public eye. The post resurrection meet-up stories were probably only to let in group know the truth. Then Paul hijacked the passions to deify his Christ and the fables became TRUTH™.

The passion was not a cover up in the modern sense, simply a punctuation to the radical humanist ministry of Jesus.Most popularpreachers of his time ended up being executed by secular or religious authorities. John the Baptist and most of the others you have heard about. Martyrdom was the capstone of their career. "I amfinished." there was nothing more to add and continuing to preach would have got him killed eventually. His cults could carry the subversive message without him better than with him and seem to have done a pretty good job. His radical humanism "Love thy personal God with all thy heart... and love thy hated neighbor as thyself." was both social and religious heresy subject to sudden death.It has nevertheless stayed alive underground through the dark ages, and blew wide open in the Enlightenment. Still heresy both civil and religious but even in America half the population is compliant with it civilly or religiously. In Europe the numbers are even higher.Jesus was certainly a married man with children and as such had obligations to stay alive to provide for them. My personal theory is that Mary Magdalene was an integral part of the creation of his message. It has to me a definitely feminine slant to it. Defiantly opposed to civil and religious patriarchy.

Saturday, March 25, 2017

And
we also discover that only those who believed in God and gave their
lives to Him will enter into heaven and those who didn't will go to the
torment of hell... what then??

What is it that you find to love in a deity that threatens you with eternal torment if you make one wrong decision?

Does
a perfect deity sound like one who feels that it is just to torment you
forever because of a choice you made based on the limited knowledge,
and some erroneous knowledge, that you had when you made the choice?

Or does it sound like a shell game designed to play upon your fears in order to persuade you to believe?

Does it sound like a policy that benefits the church more than it benefits the believer?

Does
it sound like a plan to intimidate the uncertain by depicting their
'loving' deity as one that is bigger, stronger, and incomparably more
vicious?

Does it sound like a plan that not only creates fears of
what happens after death, but also creates in humanity fears of each
other? Fears of any tolerance for anything other than what is sanctified
by the church. Fears that turn into hatreds. Fears that turn into witch
hunts. Fears that turn into jihads, crusades, and terrorism. Fears that
turn into sexual abuse.

You are welcome to indulge yourself in
all those fears. I for one have chosen to use reason to dispell them. I
don't have to live with those fears, and consider Pascal to be a coward.

If Pascal had a delete button he would have used it for this brain fart. If I were guaranteed an eternity of
bliss worshiping the glory of God, it is still a bad bet. Even if I bet
on the right God. And spent the right amount of time learning how to
worship the glory of God. What do I win? An eternity of more of the
same. Talk about SSDD."

The only life that counts is the one that begins with birth and ends
with death. It is the only one we can be sure of, and Pascal's wager
fails on the plethora of possible God bets each with different rules for
living. So we live as if the only important contribution we can make
is by living according to the best interests of our chosen society. The
agnostics among us suggest that if God is the Maitre d' in the
afterlife that is all Hesh would care about anyway.

Friday, March 17, 2017

Many years ago I proposed a tax with the unfortunate acronym of VAST. Value Added by Status Tax.

In concept it was very simple: For each category of consumption a basic level of value would be established: A public bus seat mile for transportation, a simple diner for a meal out, a street market for groceries, a basic Ford or Chevy for a car, a Boston Whaler for a boat, etc. Any vendor charging more than the basic level value would be required to add a substantial tax based on the price paid minus the basic level. If a family meal out were determined to have a basic value of $10 restaurant charging $25 would be required to charge tax on the extra $15. A restaurant charging $100 would charge tax on the $90. If well over the basic level the tax would show on the receipt as the Douchebag tax. Each category would have its own rate to give politicians something to argue about, with luxury categories taxed at a much higher rate.

Thursday, March 9, 2017

UBI might be a way to save Capitalism from worker exploitation, one of its major failings. Capitalism is based on using resources effectively to maximize return on investment of capital. One important resource is labor. There are few incentives in Capitalism to provide adequate compensation to laborers. For most jobs in a free labor market recruiting and training costs are minimal making employee turnover a non-issue compared to pay scales driving pay and working conditions to minimum legal standards. Even in higher skilled jobs where recruiting and training costs are significant immigrant labor can drive average compensation down if visas are easily acquired by the Capitalist. With a UBI recruiting and training costs become significant even for entry level jobs, as enterprises must entice employees to accept time constraints and cooperative work in competition with unlimited free time and independence with subsistence living costs covered. Wages, working conditions and benefits would be an important part of the exchange. Enterprises must also compete on quality of products especially in service industries, as entry level entrepreneurship is essentially risk free. Employed workers with a bit of extra disposable income might choose to become capitalists by backing an entrepreneur with capital rather than labor. E.g. Leasing a taco truck for a latino family with traditional food preparation skills. A risk free transactionon both sides. The capitalist still has his job and if the truck doesn't pay a competitive wage for the entrepreneurs plus a return on the lease, at the end of the lease everybody goes back to the status quo. At higher skill (and pay) levels working conditions, hours and time off, benefits and other intangibles, will be a competitive necessity to retain high skilled employees that can easily save enough FYM to become a competitor. Employee spin-offs will be an important source of competition in most industries even ones with extremely high entry costs. See Lucid Motors as a recent new entry in the automotive industry.

An alternative
economic system to Capitalism (never before tried) that might work is
based on a UBI with a slight surplus over subsistence (UBI+) where
people buy goods and services direct from the producers via apps like
Amazon or Lyft with the producers funding their means of production via
loans from the local thrift institutions that float the UBI, surplus and
accumulated savings for speculative productivity aids. Neither the
thrift institutions nor the government would invest in or subsidize productive facilities. Government spending on infrastructure would be treated as a consumer good. Government itself would be as usual a slush fund for politicians. The money supply would be managed by the Government by regulating the amount of the surplus to balance supply and demand in the economy. The government providing the UBI+ would collect taxes using a progressive income tax on producers, or a VAST progressive VAT on consumption. Links to both are below the fold.---------------------------- A thorough analysis of the tax effects of UBI based on income taxes.Hat tip to @miniverhttps://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/why-we-should-all-have-a-basic-income/